SOURCE: Kemp, Philip. Review of In the Mouth of Madness, by John Carpenter. Sight and Sound 5, no. 8 (August 1995): 52–53.

In the following review, Kemp argues that In the Mouth of Madness demonstrates Carpenter's virtuoso cinematic technique, but that the film fails to effectively play on viewers's emotions.

Even if John Carpenter has yet to recapture the gleeful, buzzsaw energy of his earliest work, several of his subsequent films have come sufficiently within striking distance to keep his admirers hoping for a return to form. In the Mouth of Madness isn't that; but it's an accomplished and well put-together piece of work—one that moreover achieves a rare balancing act in parodying the horror genre without sending it up. True, the plot is derivative; but then that's the whole point.

The chief source of the film, as screenwriter Michael De Luca readily admits, is H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, in...